Duncan, Robert Edward (7 Jan. 1919-3 Feb. 1988), poet, was born
Edward Howard Duncan in Oakland, California, the son of Edward Howard Duncan, a day
laborer, and Marguerite Pearl Carpenter, who died at childbirth. His father could not
afford to keep him, and he was adopted in August 1919 by Edwin Joseph Symmes, an
architect, and Minnehaha Harris, who renamed him Robert Edward Symmes. After a psychiatric
discharge from the army in 1941, the poet made a composite of his previous names to form
the present one.

Duncan's foster parents were devout Theosophists and chose their adopted son after
consulting horoscopes and astrological charts relating to his birth; he was told he was
descended from a line after the destruction of Atlantis and was fated to witness a second
death of civilization by fire and holocaust. Duncan grew up in an atmosphere of seances,
meetings of the Hermetic Brotherhood, and a library of occult literature. His childhood
dreams were carefully interpreted by his parents; following an accident on the snow at age
three he was cross-eyed and saw double, a fact that seemed to confirm the "double
vision" of his parents' world. The twinning of objects in his sight later entered his
poetry as a motif of the dual realities of sight and imagination. As he wrote in Roots
and Branches, "Ihad the double reminder always, the vertical and
horizontal displacement in vision that later became separated, specialized into a near and
a far sight. One image to the right and above the other. Reach out and touch. Point to the
one that is really there." Both his adoption and his accident figure richly in his
poetry as signs from a spiritual world whose minglings and interplay with the physical
realm form the whole of reality and the subject of his writing.

Duncan entered the University of California at Berkeley on a scholarship in 1936, a
year after his adopted father's death. While there, he drifted to the political left and
began writing poems on social issues and class conflict. His circle included several young
women who encouraged his poetry and rebellious spirit. Under the influences of Mary and
Lilli Fabilli, from a family of crop pickers in the San Joaquin valley; the poet and
painter Virginia Admiral; Pauline Kael, the movie critic; and Ida Bear, a writer, Duncan
thrived as storyteller, poet, and fledgling bohemian. By his sophomore year he quit
attending required military drills and dropped classes he no longer enjoyed.

In 1938 he quit Berkeley presumably to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina,
where he visited briefly and fled after a heated argument with faculty over the conduct of
the Spanish Civil War. He joined his male lover, an instructor whom he had first met at
Berkeley, in Philadelphia, but the relationship suffered from the tensions of life
"in the closet" and ended after two years. It was the first of several long-term
relationships. From there Duncan wandered to Woodstock, New York, to join a small commune
run by James Cooney, whose magazine, The Phoenix, was dedicated to the writings of
D. H. Lawrence. As assistant and contributor, Duncan came into contact with Henry Miller
(1891-1980), Anaïs Nin, and other bohemians. Both Miller and Nin praised Duncan's early
prose, but his pagan lyrics soon offended Cooney's literary tastes.

In 1941 he was drafted and sent to San Antonio for training. After a month of boot camp
he declared his homosexuality and was discharged. "I am an officially certified fag
now," he told friends.

In 1943 Duncan had tired of male lovers and turned to Marjorie McKee for his first
sexual encounter with a female. They married soon after and then divorced several months
later following an abortion. A year later, after a brief sojourn in Florida, he became a
gigolo in New York, he later told interviewers. As editor of the Experimental Review at
Cooney's farm in New York, Duncan had corresponded with the California poet Kenneth
Rexroth. When Duncan returned to San Francisco in 1945, Rexroth, the "father" of
the San Francisco renaissance, befriended Duncan and introduced him to the poetry of Edith
Sitwell and H.D. The latter was a lifelong influence on him and the subject of his massive
critical project, the H.D. Book which appeared in magazines over the years.

Duncan's essay "The Homosexual in Society" appeared in the August 1944 issue
of Dwight Macdonald's journal, Politics. The article identified the plight of the
homosexual with that of the Negro and the Jew in contemporary society and denounced not
only the persecutors but the cult of homosexual superiority that rejected the straight
world. Social redemption lay in inclusiveness and love, he argued, as he regrounded his
poetry in an ever-widening context of rejected experience. His cause as poet was to
denounce "dead Christianity," the prejudices against minorities and sexual
freedom, and the exploitation of the working classes.

By the mid-1940s Duncan had consolidated in himself the lore and experience of the
social outsider. Rather than style himself an antihero or social rebel, however, through
his poetry he sought the general reader, whom he wished to serve as intermediary of larger
but forbidden worlds. Duncan rejected the notion of a small, elite audience of initiates
for poetry; the goals of art were to raise awareness and compassion in the mainstream
audience, a concern formed in him from his earliest days with the Fabilli sisters and the
political ferments of Berkeley.

Duncan returned to Berkeley to study medieval and Renaissance literature (1948-1950)
following the publication of his first book, Heavenly City, Earthly City (1947). He
enjoyed functioning as shaman of an emerging literature grounded in magic, polytheism, and
sexual diversity, and he cultivated the role in weekly salons of the Moon Society. It was
this Duncan, borne into the living room on pillows, that Charles Olson rebuked in his
essay "Against Wisdom as Such" (1954). But the serious work continued. As Duncan
wrote in The Truth and Life of Myth, "The poetic imagination faces the
challenge of finding a structure that will be the complex story of all the stories felt to
be true, a myth in which something like the variety of man's experience of what is real
may be contained." Duncan found such a structure in "The Venice Poem" of
1948, his first successful attempt at a large, dynamic sequence drawing on myth (Henri
Rousseau's painting The Dream and Igor Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements).Poetry was akin to collage in its gathering of many sources, including other poetry,
to form its visionary whole.

In 1951 Duncan met his lifelong lover, the painter and collagist Jess Collins, with
whom he lived in San Francisco. Collins provided illustrations for many of his books, and
the collage mode was central to both artists.

"The Venice Poem" set the form and methodology of all his succeeding work and
its sequential movement anticipated the style of other major texts of the postmodern
revolution, Charles Olson's "The Kingfishers" (1949) and Allen Ginsberg's
"Howl" (1955). Duncan was at the center of the San Francisco renaissance; his
connections to Olson and Black Mountain College, where he taught in 1956, put him at the
center of the Black Mountain movement as well. In 1952 Duncan began publishing his work in
Origin and Black Mountain Review, the organs of the Black Mountain group. In
the winter of 1956-1957 he served as assistant director of the Poetry Center at San
Francisco State University.

His reputation as a major poet was established in the 1960s in three collections, The
Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968),
which contain many of the enduring masterpieces of mythopoeic verse. Duncan was a master
at analyzing his own creative process in such poems as "The Song of the
Borderguard," "An Owl Is an Only Bird of Poetry," and "A Poem
Beginning with a Line by Pindar." These and other poems welcomed the eruption of
creative imagery that seems at first chaotic but forms its own underlying coherence
through Duncan's lyric syntheses. Indeed, the central thrust of his poetry is that the
welter of voices and images in the mind springs from the self's limpid coherence; nature's
plenty is unified by its own organic processes that the poems reenact and celebrate.

The concept of unity within diversity is tested to its limits in two long sequences
that unfold from Roots and Branches and carry on into later books: "The
Structure of Rime" and "Passages," with the latter evolving into its own
separate sequence in Tribunals (1970). Both are lyric collages drawing on many
subjects and the theme of war in the Vietnam era. Duncan vigorously opposed the war in
"Passages" and interpreted it through a mythological perspective. In 1968 he
explored the use of myth in the essay TheTruth and Life of Myth: An Essay in
Essential Autobiography.

The 1960s brought him considerable recognition, including the Harriet Monroe Memorial
Prize (1961), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1963), the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine
(1964), and three writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1985 he
received the National Poetry Award.

After publication of Bending the Bow in 1968, Duncan renounced publishing as a
distraction to his work and vowed not to publish a new book for fifteen years. True to his
word, Ground Work: Before the War did not appear until 1984, followed by Ground
Work II: In the Dark (1987), the last of his major collections. After a long struggle
with kidney disease and dialysis treatments, Duncan died in San Francisco.

Duncan's critical reception has been mixed and often hostile. Yvor Winters rejected his
lack of "moral fiber"; James Dickey declared him "unpityingly
pretentious"; and A. R. Ammons found his work too studied. But a host of other
critics writing in the wake of postmodernism hailed him as a major voice of the era. His
work embodies the restless spirit of midcentury, with its exploration of sexuality and
religion and its need to investigate the hidden corners of the psyche.

Most of Duncan's papers are housed in the Poetry/Rare Book Collection, State University
of New York, Buffalo, and in the Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Department of Special
Collections, University of California, San Diego. Bibliographies of his work include
Robert J. Bertholf, Robert Duncan: A Descriptive Bibliography (1986), and Willard
Fox, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, and Robert Duncan: A Reference Guide (1989).

Duncan's juvenilia are collected in The Years as Catches: First Poems, 1939-1946 (1966).
Early work is also collected in Caesar's Gate: Poems, 1949-50 (1955, repr. 1972); The
First Decade: Selected Poems, 1940-1950 (1968); and A Book of Resemblances: Poems,
1950-1953 (1966). Derivations: Selected Poems, 1950-1956 (1966) follows the
course of Duncan's literary assimilations. His plays include Faust Foutu (1959,
repr. 1985) and Medea at Kolchis: The Maiden Head (1965).

The only biography to date is Faas, Young Robert Duncan: Portrait of the Poet as
Homosexual in Society (1983), which covers his life to 1950. Good criticism is still
sparse, but a useful introduction is Mark Andrew Johnson, Robert Duncan (1988), and
a collection of essays edited by Bertholf and Ian W. Reid, Robert Duncan: Scales of the
Marvelous (1979). Special issues of journals on Duncan include Ironwood 22
(1983), Maps 6 (1974), and Sagetrieb 4, no. 2/3 (1985). Nathaniel Mackey's
"The World-Poem in Microcosm: Robert Duncan's "The Continent,"' ELH
47 (1980): 595-618, gives a perceptive analysis of Duncan's lyric method. Obituaries are
in the New York Times, 4 Feb. 1988, and the Los Angeles Times, 4 Feb. 1988.